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Name(Group Members) Guzman, Hidalgo, Labriaga, Lacsamana, Lim, Lopez Group No.

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Subject and Section CO100 BC2B Date December 17, 2009

grave tone, “Judas, do you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?”35 Unfortunately, Judas uses
his free will to reject what could have healed that conscience of his, so “full of guilty sores.”36
From even this one example, one can see why More insisted that “nothing can contribute
more effectively . . .to the implanting of every sort of virtue in the Christian breast than pious
and fervent meditation on the successive events of Christ’s Passion.”37
This counsel is quite similar to one he ad given almost thirty years earlier:
[In time of temptation]
Think on the very lamentable pain,
Think on the piteous cross of woeful Christ,
Think on His blood beat out at every vein,
Think on his precious heart carved in twain,
Think how for thy redemption all was wrought-
Let him not lose thee, whom He so dear has bought.38

35
SC, p. 73; CW 14, p. 403, Line 12, top 407, Line 2.
36
SC, p. 83; CW 14, p. 457, line 5
37
SC, p. 61; CW 14, p. 339, line 17, top. 341, line 3.
38
EW, p. 388.

CO100 Information Technology with Mass Media Applications 6


Second semester 2008-2009
Name(Group Members) Guzman, Hidalgo, Labriaga, Lacsamana, Lim, Lopez Group No. 4
Subject and Section CO100 BC2B Date December 17, 2009

THE VOLUNTEER AT AUSCHWITZ


Chuck Colson

Between 1940 and 1945, as many as two million people were murdered at
the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz and the neighboring
extermination site of Treblinka in south-central Poland. Countless acts of
courage and faith took place amid the horror there. This is the story of
one of them.

aximilian Kolbe was forty-five years old in the early autumn of 1939 when the
Nazis invaded his homeland. He was a polish friar in Niepokalanow, a village
near Warsaw. There, 762 priests and lay brothers lived in the largest friary in the
world.
Father Kolbe presided over Niepokalanow with a combination of industry, joy, love, and
humor that made him beloved by the plainspoken brethren there.
In his simple room, he sat each morning at a pigeonhole desk, a large globe before him,
praying over the world. He did so, tortured by the fact that a pale man with arresting blue
eyes and a terrifying power of manipulation had whipped the people of Germany into a
frenzy. Whole nations had already fallen to the evil Adolf Hitler and his Nazis.
“An atrocious conflict is brewing,” Father Kolbe told a group of friars one day after he
had finished prayers. “We do not know what will develop. In our beloved Poland, we must
expect the worst.” Father Kolbe was right. His country was next.
On September 1, 1939, the Nazi blitzkrieg broke over Poland. After several weeks, a
group of Germans arrived at Niepokalanow on motorcycles and arrested Father Kolbe and all
but two of his friars who had remained behind. They were loaded on trucks, then into
livestock wagons, and two days later arrived at Amtitz, a prison camp.
Conditions were horrible, but not horrific. Prisoners were hungry, but no one died of
starvation. Strangely, within a few weeks the brothers were released from prison. Back at the
friary, they found the buildings vandalized and the Nazis in control, using the facility as the
deportation camp for political prisoners, refugees, and Jews.
The situation was an opportunity for ministry, and Father Kolbe took advantage of it,
helping the sick and comforting the fearful.
While Kolbe and the friars used their time to serve others, the Nazis used theirs to decide
just how to impose their will on the rest of Europe. To Adolf Hitler, the Jews and Slavic
people were the Untermenschen (sub humans). Their cultures and cities were to be erased and
their industry appropriated for Germany. On October 2, Hitler outlined a secret memorandum
to Hans Frank, the governor general of Poland. In a few phrases he determined the grim
outcome for millions: “The [ordinary] Poles are especially born for low labor . . . the Polish

CO100 Information Technology with Mass Media Applications 7


Second semester 2008-2009
Name(Group Members) Guzman, Hidalgo, Labriaga, Lacsamana, Lim, Lopez Group No. 4
Subject and Section CO100 BC2B Date December 17, 2009

gentry must cease to exist . . . all representatives of the Polish intelligentsia are to be
exterminated. . . . There should be one master for the Poles, the German.”
As for Poland’s hundreds of thousands of priests?
“They will preach what we want them to preach,” said Hitler’s memo. “If any priest acts
differently, we will make short work of him. The task of the priest is to keep the Poles quiet,
stupid, and dull-witted.”
Maximilian Kolbe was clearly a priest who “acted differently” from the Nazis’ designs.
In early February 1941, the Polish underground smuggled word to Kolbe that his name
was on a Gestapo list: he was to be arrested. Kolbe knew what happened to loved ones
of those who tried to elude the Nazis’ grasps; their friends and colleagues were taken instead.
He had no wife or children; his church was his family. And he could not risk the loss of any of
his brothers in Christ. So he stayed at Niepokalanow.
At nine o’clock on the morning of February 17, Father Kolbe was sitting at his pigeonhole
desk, his eyes and prayers on the globe before him, when he heard the sound of heavy
vehicles outside the nick panes of his green-painted windows. He knew it was the Nazis, but
he remained at his desk. He would wait for them to come to him.
After being held in Nazi prisons for several months, Father Kolbe was found guilty of the
crime of publishing unapproved materials and sentenced to Auschwitz. Upon his arrival at the
camp in May 1941, an SS officer informed him that the life expectancy of priests there was
about a month. Kolbe was assigned to the timber detail; he was to carry felled tree trunks
from one place to another. Guards stood by to ensure that the exhausted prisoners did so at a
quick trot.
Years of slim rations and overwork at Niepokalanow had already weakened Kolbe. Now,
under the load of wood, he staggered and collapsed. Officers converged on him, kicking him
with their shiny leather boots, and beating him with their whips. He was stretched out on a pile
of wood, dealt fifty lashes, then shoved into a ditch, covered with branches, and left for dead.
Later, having been picked up by some brave prisoners, he awoke in a camp hospital bed
alongside several other near-dead inmates. There miraculously, he revived.
“No need to waste gas or a bullet on that one,” chuckled one SS officer to another. “He’ll
be dead soon.”
Kolbe was switched to other work and transferred to Barracks 14, where he continued to
minister to his fellow prisoners, so tortured by hunger they could not sleep.
By the end of July 1941, Auschwitz was working like a well-organized killing machine,
and the Nazis congratulated themselves on their efficiency. The camp’s fire chimneys never
stopped smoking. The stench was terrible, but the results were excellent: eight thousand Jews
could be stripped, their possessions appropriated for the Reich, gassed, and cremated----all in
twenty-four hours. Every twenty-four hours.
About the only problem was the occasional prisoner from the work side of the camp who
would figure out a way to escape. When these escapes were caught, as they usually were,
they would be hanged with special nooses that slowly choked out their miserable lives----a
grave warning to others who might be tempted to try.
Then one July night as the frogs and insects in the marshy land surrounding the camp
began their evening chorus, the air was suddenly filled with the baying of dogs, the curses of
soldiers, and the roar of motorcycles. A man had escaped from Barracks 14.
The next morning there was a peculiar tension as the ranks of phantom-thin prisoners
lined up for morning roll call in the central square, their eyes on the large gallows before

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Second semester 2008-2009

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